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Historian Wick to lecture at WCSU on ‘Athens in Age of the Apostles’ Gordon College professor to deliver Macricostas Hellenic Studies Lecture

DANBURY, CONN. — Dr. David Wick, a Hellenic scholar specializing in the cultural, religious and military history of ancient Greece and the Mediterranean region, will discuss “Athens in the Age of the Apostles” in the Macricostas Hellenic and Modern Greek Studies Lecture on Thursday, April 11, 2013, at Western Connecticut State University.

The lecture will be at 7 p.m. in Room 125 of the Science Building on the university’s Midtown campus, 181 White St. in Danbury. Admission will be free and the public is invited. The talk will be presented by the School of Arts and Sciences as part of the lecture series sponsored by the foundation of Brookfield industrialist and philanthropist Constantine “Deno” Macricostas and his wife Marie.

Dr. Nicholas Pappas, Macricostas Visiting Endowed Chair in Hellenic and Modern Greek Studies at WCSU, observed Wick will draw upon his extensive research on the city of Athens during the Roman Empire to describe Athens in the first century, when the apostle Paul and other Christian missionaries arrived to bear witness in the city.

Wick said his lecture will provide background on the nature of the community that the first generation of apostles encountered in Athens, as well as the missionaries’ impressions of the era’s leading intellectual center and the perceptions that Athenians and Christians developed about each other. “We will explore what sort of history this new tide of belief and culture created as Christians and ‘old school’ Athenians tried to understand one another,” he noted.

Recipient of a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Wick has been a member of the history department faculty at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass., since 1995, and visits Greece each year to pursue research and teaching. His published works cover a wide range of interests including ancient urban studies, classical religious and social change, and ancient technologies.

In a series of papers published by the Athens Institute for Education and Research, Wick has described how Athens survived and flourished as a center of learning under Roman rule, attracting students from across the empire to its philosophy schools and renewing its cultural heritage with Roman-sponsored construction of monuments including Hadrian’s Library and the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, a stone theatre adjacent to the Acropolis. In 2005 he presented his paper, “An Athenian Alchemy: The Survival of Athens as a Destination of Refuge for Foreigners at the End of the Roman Republic,” at the Third International Conference on European History held in Greece.

“David brings to his teaching a vast knowledge of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean worlds, from religious to scientific to military history,” Gordon Department of History Chair Dr. Stephen Alter wrote in his recommendation letter for the award. Alter cited Wick’s special gifts for “re-creating the ancient world” through his lectures on Greek culture, politics and warfare, and for “relating ancient history to current concerns” in Greece and the Aegean region.

For more information, contact the Office of University Relations at (203) 837-8486.

Western Connecticut State University offers outstanding faculty in a range of quality academic programs. Our diverse university community provides students an enriching and supportive environment that takes advantage of the unique cultural offerings of Western Connecticut and New York. Our vision: To be an affordable public university with the characteristics of New England’s best small private universities.